Statue of Saddam Hussein in front of a bombed-out communication centre in Baghdad in March 2003.
Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Iraq entered my life 25 years ago in the form of Scud missiles arcing west. I was an American student in Jerusalem, living on French Hill in a shared apartment with friends, books, guitars and future ex-girlfriends.

Back then, to my mind, the word Iraq evoked a place. A place where Saddam Hussein ruled; where a war against Iran had been fought, a war against Kuwait, and a war against a global UN coalition impending. It was place that was old and interesting but not one – as I understood it – connected to me in any direct way. In January 1991, the UN deadline passed, the air war began, and Saddam tried to provoke Israel into joining the war against him, hoping that it might break up the coalition. Evenings were spent in gas masks anticipating a biological or chemical attack as we listened to the radio for information. We learned the meaning (and then became practitioners) of black humour.

Twenty-five years later, the word Iraq no longer evokes a place to me. When I hear it in conversation, it cues up a problem – the problem, if you will, of it no longer being a place.

If one allows it to, the place or the problem can be allowed to drift away. We are weary, and it no longer invites attention. The story of Iraq has ended, we feel, because we see nothing but repetition. But the story is not over. If anything, it is only beginning.

These are books on my mind about Iraq – and the wider Middle East. I think they are good. Maybe essential.

1. The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon (2010)According to Muslim tradition, the corpse washer prepares the bodies of the dead for burial. The Shias and Sunnis both do it, and the differences in practice are minor. This is a novel, originally written in Arabic, by a New York-based Iraqi writer who left the country in 1991. He translated it himself. No other book I’ve read takes us closer to the lives of the people there, breathing a much-needed human dimension to understanding life in Iraq.

2. The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)Ten years ago things were going badly in Iraq. There was a threat of civil war, insurgents were increasing in strength, Syria’s stability was threatened, and Iran was playing fast and loose with its involvement. The Iraq Study Group was established to take a hard look at the situation and form a strategy for US involvement. The bipartisan result was a solid piece of work and, with hindsight, suggested probably the only reasonable way the situation could have been salvaged.

3. Fobbit by David Abrams (2012)There is the world. And then there is the world that we would prefer the world to be. Most of us spend too much time in the latter. And when it comes to the American public and their views of soldiers and soldiering, it can seem like a permanent vacation. But in this wickedly funny novel, Abrams sees right past the self-aggrandising illusions and comforting fairytales that tuck the US in at night.

4. Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays, Adda B Bozeman (1992)Bozeman was a key academic in the development of intelligence studies in the US. In 1976, she wrote an article published in Orbis (Vol 20, No 1) called War and the Clash of Ideas. In that piece, reproduced in collection, Bozeman talks about how ideas both form and sustain communities through time, as commitments to ways of life. But these commitments can clash. Strategic intelligence becomes the discipline of knowing ourselves as a cultural system, seeing others on their own terms, and then crafting means of engagement to positive effect. Unfortunately, this profound insight was misrepresented in an inferior book called War and the Clash of Civilisations by Samuel Huntington.

5. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012) This is a soldier’s story turned into fiction and told with expressive power and remarkable intensity. The Yellow Birds is heartfelt and successful effort to witness and contribute to a war literature that we need. It is also a cracking story that pulls us in and wraps us in its own sense of wonder.

Essential insights... two men glance through the volumes of the Chilcot inquiry’s report. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/AP

6. Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend (2005)This is not so much a book as a collection of blogs written by a young Iraqi woman using the handle Riverbend. It begins, casually and self-consciously with, “I’m female, Iraqi, and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know.” Her witty and insightful writing is a corrective to our lopsided view of a world we know far too little about.

7. Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)War in the west has – for a good 400 years – been a bloody game of capture the flag. Once we captured the other guy’s capital city, papers were exchanged and treaties were signed, and terms were given and accepted. Today, we are experiencing the end of the dominance of western military power and its system of rules. This excellent book laid bare, for me, how unprepared we are as a cultural system to turn that corner.

8. Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq by Rory McCarthy (2006) Posted as a journalist to Iraq, McCarthy started collecting stories from ordinary people – stories that mostly began in 1991, during what they called the Shaaban intifada, or “the Separation”. Far too many accounts of modern Iraq omit this full-blown civil war. McCarthy draws a line from those wounds through to the next wars and beyond in stories that are revealing, shocking, human, and faithfully portrayed. He gives us an intimate “outside-in” view of the world as a professional writer, which brilliantly complements Riverbend’s “inside-out” blogging.

9. The Chilcot reportNo, it’s not a book. No, I haven’t read it all – and neither will you. But as the years roll on, it will prove to be one of the most significant insights into the day-to-day functioning of the UK government and, indeed, any democratic government. Like the records of the Cuban missile crisis and WikiLeaks, these volumes will be pored over by graduate students for decades, trying to understand the mess these people stepped into (2001 was not the beginning and they didn’t create it); the mess they made; and the mess they left behind (some of which you can probably see from your window).

10. The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service by David Finkle (2009, 2013)Yes, that’s two books but you are the country that gave us Spinal Tap, and should therefore be sympathetic to cranking things up to 11. And together, these books do. The first is an engrossing story of the Iraq war from the perspective of American soldiers and, for me, illustrated how every high-level failure of politics, imagination, and planning lands on the shoulders of those who cannot possibly fix them – but are ordered to. The second book tells a far more rarely told, but equally vivid, story – of those same people coming home, broken, and how our abandonment of them changes them and defines us.